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I I A S N ew s l e t t e r | #4 3 | S p r i n g 20 0 78
> Comparative Intellectual Histories of Early Modern Asia
The problem of early modernity inthe Sanskrit intellectual tradition
Anyone who aims to discuss the Sanskrit intellectual tradition of the early modern period is required to preface his exposition with two remarks. The first is the typical caution
offered by those in a new field of research, though in this case the caution truly has bite. Sanskrit science and scholarship from the 16th through the 18th centuries has only
jus t b egun to att rac t t he att enti on of scho lar s. In add ition, the vas t m ajority of text s have neve r b een publ ish ed, and som e o f t hese are hou sed in libr arie s and arc hive s wher e
access is either difficult or impossible. The second remark concerns a rather atypical language restriction on our problematic. In striking contrast to China or the Middle East,
while somewhat comparable to Western Europe, India in the early modern period shows a multiplicity of written languages for the cultivation of science and scholarship. But two
of these, Sanskrit and Persian, monopolised the field, and did so in ways that were both parallel and nonintersecting. Each constituted the principal language of science for its
associated social-religious sphere, while very few scholars were proficient in both (at least aside from mathematicians and astronomers, and even these were very much in the
minority). Sanskrit continued its pervasive, age-old dominance in the Hindu scholarly community, and merits consideration as a completely self-contained intellectual formation.
With those two clarifications in mind we can proceed to ask what actually occurred in the world of Sanskrit knowledge during the early modern period, and how a comparative
analysis may illuminate the general problem of modernity.
Sheldon Pollock
What happened in Sanskritintellectual history in theearly modern period?Two trends have begun to manifest
themselves to scholars working in theperiod, which are gradually hardening
into facts. The first is that an extraor-
dinary upsurge in writing across intel-
lectual disciplines can be observed
beginning in the 16th century. Second,
a gradual but unmistakable decline set
in beginning in the early 18th, which by
the centurys end had accelerated to the
point where one might be justified in
speaking of an evaporation of creative
energy in many Sanskrit disciplines.
The explosion of writing occurred in
a wide domain of scholarship. Con-
sider hermeneutics (mimamsa) and
political theory (raja-dharma-sastra). In
the former, a burst of writing begins
around 1550. For example, the premiercompendium on the subject, composed
around 1000 (the Sastra-dipika, Lamp
for the Science), which seems not to
have been touched for five centuries,
became the object of sustained reexam-
ination, with a half-dozen major reas-
sessments between 1550 and 1650. In
fact, that hundred-year period is prob-
ably the most productive era in the his-
tory of hermeneutics since the seventh
century. In political theory, from the
time of the Kritya-kalpataru (Wishing
Stone of Moral Duty) at the end of the
12th century to late 16th only a single,
minor work in the field was produced
(the Raja-niti-ratnakara of Candesvara
c. 1400). Beginning in 1575 or so, how-
ever, a range of often vast treatises werecomposed from within the heart of poli-
ties from Almor in the northern hills to
Tanjavur in the peninsula.
The same kind of uptick, though fol-
lowing a slightly different timeline, can
be found in many other domains. Sig-
nificant new work in logic was sparked
by the searching genius of Raghunatha
Siromani (c. 1550); in astronomy, too,
unprecedented contributions were
made starting with Jnanaraja in 1503.
In these and the other cases Ive cited,
we begin to find not just large amounts
of new writing but writing that is sub-
stantively new.
The trend we see is no mere artifact of
preservation. There is no evidence thatanything substantial in hermeneutics,
political theory, logic, or astronomy
was lost in the preceding period. Can-
desvaras work in political theory, for
example, refers to only one text from
the entire preceding two centuries. The
upsurge we see is real.
Nor was this trend a matter of mere
proliferation of texts. To an important
degree we find intellectual innovation
was as well. There is, for one thing, anew multidisciplinarity on the part of
scholars. Earlier hermeneutists never
wrote juridical treatises (or scholars of
jurisprudence hermeneutics), let alone
aesthetics; it now became common. In
addition, scholars adopted an entirely
new discursive idiom, the more abstract
language of the New Logic. Entirely
new scholarly genres began to appear:
in grammar, the Prakriya-kaumudi
(Moonlight of Transformations, and
its later imitation, the Siddhanta-kau-
mudi, Moonlight of Doctrine) radically
redesigned the most hallowed of Indian
intellectual monuments, the two-mil-
lennium-old grammar of Panini. At the
same time (and this is no contradiction),
a new concern with the textuality of thefoundational texts (in logic, for exam-
ple) is manifest though this nowhere
reaches the pitch of philological inno-
vation we find in late imperial China
or Humanist Italy. And with it came a
return to the sources; hermeneutists, for
example, begin to comment again direct-
ly on the sutrasof Jaimini. Most dramati-
cally, we find a new historical, perhaps
even historicist, conceptual framework
for understanding the development
of the knowledge systems. The late-
17th-century Nyaya-kaustubha (Divine
Jewel of Logic) organizes its exposition
by referring to the ancients, the fol-
lowers of the ancients, the moderns,
the most up-to-date scholars, and the
contemporaries. Knowledge is thoughtto be better not just because it may be
better (because of its greater coherence,
economy, or explanatory power), but
also in part because it is new. Consider,
finally, such claims to conceptual nov-
elty that begin to make their appear-
ance. Raghunatha defends what he calls
a philosophical viewpoint that emerges
precisely in opposition to the tenets of
all other viewpoints, while Dinakara
Bhatta (Varanasi, fl. 1620) announces
at the beginning of his treatise on
hermeneutics that he intends to prove
by other means, clarify, or even uproot
the thought of the outmoded authori-
ties. A century earlier the astronomer
Nilakantha Somayaji of Kerala dared to
argue that the astronomical parametersand models inherited from the texts of
the past were not in themselves perma-
nently correct, but needed constantly to
be improved and corrected based on a
systematic practice of observation and
reason. Few declarations of this sort had
been heard earlier in India.
All this changed fundamentally in the
course of the eighteenth century, when
or such is my present assessment the capacity of Sanskrit thought to make
history dramatically diminished in most
fields. The production of texts on politi-
cal theory ceased entirely; a few minor
works from Maratha Tanjavur are all we
can find. In hermeneutics the last con-
tribution of significance significant in
the eyes of the tradition itself is that of
Vancesvara Diksi ta (Tanjavur, fl. 1800);
in literary theory, that of Visvesvara
(Almora, fl. 1725). What we seem to be
witnessing in very marked contrast
to China or Western Europe is the
exhaustion of a once-great intellectual
tradition.
We are far from satisfactorily explain-
ing either the upsurge and the decline,
though we can make a much betterguess about the former than about the
latter. It seems to me rather obvious that
the conditions for unleashing the new
intellectual energies across the whole
range of social formations (from courtly
Tanjavur to free-market Varanasi) were
made possible by the Mughal peace,
with the consolidation of the empire by
Akbar (r. 1556-1605). As for the decline,
it is far more difficult to explain in either
intellectual-historical or social-historical
terms. Internally, we can perceive how
a moment of incipient modernity was
neutralized by a kind of neo-tradition-
alism, as Ill detail momentarily. Exter-
nally, the acceleration of a European
colonisation of the Indian imagination,
although still superficial in the 18thcentury, may have played a role, though
this has yet to be clearly demonstrated.
Consider the stunning fact almost too
stunning to be a fact that before 1800
we know of not a single thinker writing
in Sanskrit who refers to any European
form of knowledge.
Comparison: navyas, lesmodernes, and the problemof early modernity in IndiaThe history of Sanskrit knowledge sys-
tems in the early modern period shows
some astonishing parallels with contem-
poraneous Europe. Let me just examine
one of these in some detail that in both
its structure and its consequences is
representative of the whole conceptualcomplex.
In Sanskrit literary theory a consensus
about what made it possible to create
poetry had long reigned undisputed,
and was given canonical authority by the
11th-century thinker Mammata: poetry
can be produced only given the pres-
ence of three co-operating causes: tal-
ent, learning, and training. For the first
time in a thousand years this consen-
sus was challenged by a scholar namedSrivatsalanchana (Orissa, fl. 1550). He
claimed that talent alone was necessary,
while launching a frontal assault on the
whole conceptual edifice of Mammata,
whose views he dismisses, with rare
contempt, as completely fatuous. In
the 17th and early 18th centuries, how-
ever, the position of Srivatsalanchana
and his followers was itself the target
of a withering critique by a number
of scholars such as Bhimasena Diksita
(Kanyakubja, c. 1720), who vigorously
sought to reestablish the old consensus
against those they called the navyas,
the new scholars the term signified
something quite different from the
merely contemporary or present-day
(adhunika, adyatana) and this was asobriquet that Srivatsalanchana almost
certainly had claimed for himself.
If this dispute over the three causes
of poetic creativity seems minor, the
issues it raises for cultural theory are
not, something that comparison with
contemporaneous Europe allows us to
see with special clarity. The compari-
son also shows how differently India
and Europe responded to similar con-
ceptual challenges and how radically,
after centuries of homomorphism, their
intellectual histories diverged.
In India, the stakes in the dispute were
by no means as slight as they may
appear to be from our present vantage
point (where most literary stakes seemslight). Everyone participating in the
Sanskrit conversation clearly under-
stood that the rejection of learning and
training and the complete reliance on
inspiration was precisely the rejection
that many vernacularpoets had been
making since at least the 12th century.
And much of this vernacularity repre-
sented, not just an alternative to the
Sanskrit language, but to the Sanskrit
cultural and political order indeed, the
12th-century Kannada poet Basava is a
salient example.
Remarkably similar was the discourse
on the three sources of poetry in Europe
that began in the early 17th century. In
England this discourse was a basic com-ponent of neoclassicism a neoclassi-
cism that became increasingly reac-
tionary especially after 1688 which
was epitomised by Ben Jonson. For him
naturall wit, or talent, required the
discipline given by exercise, imitation
of classical models, and art, knowl-
edge of rules for effective expression.
A similar and earlier cultural complex
can be found in France, starting with
the Pliade in the mid-16th century.And in both cases was the neoclassical
view attacked. In France this occurred
famously in the Querelle des anciens et
des modernes, with Charles Perrault in
1688 celebrating inspiration (le gnie)
and ones own lights (propres lumires)
over the doxa of tradition, and, above all,
talent over training based on mechani-
cal imitation of the classics.
If the terms of the debate were nearly
identical, the outcomes and conse-
quences were fundamentally different.
In Europe, the historical development is
well known, leading to a transformation
of the sense of tradition and the past
indeed, if Frederic Jameson is correct,
it led to the very invention of the idea ofhistoricism, with the past being neither
better nor worse, just different. In India,
a potentially powerful idea of inspi-
ration outside traditions discipline,
and with it, a potentially transforma-
tive idea of freedom, died on the vine.
With one exception, Srivatsalanchana
had no defenders in the 17th century,
and was virtually forgotten thereafter
indeed, along with the debate itself.
More generally, the navya impulse
itself was largely repudiated. An even
more passionate defense of the status
of Mammata, unlike anything seen in
the past, was offered by Bhimasena,
who asserted that the moderns view
on talent is mere vaporizing that fails
to understand the hidden intention ofthe author, who was an incarnation of
the Goddess of Speech. This is more
than recentering the authority of the
medieval scholastics; tradition had now
become the voice of God pronouncing
on matters of culture. And, it suggests
the presence of something internal,
not external, to the Sanskrit intellectual
formation, however far this something
may still elude our historical recon-
struction, that arrested the capacity for
development by cordoning off the kind
of critique that had once supplied that
formations very life force.
What we may be seeing here is the intel-
lectual dimension of a larger political
transformation. As the early modern
period began and the vast changes inwealth arrived, along with the new
Mughal peace, a new intellectual
movement was emboldened to rethink
the whole past. When the Mughal order
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> Comparative Intellectual Histories of Early Modern Asia
gan to crack or perhaps when the
w social facts of capitalist-colonial
dernity became too much for the
lier conceptual repertoire to capture
alone evaluate a turn to a new tradi-
nalism was found to be salutary. And
ditionalist knowledge has a certain
sis built into it, which may account
the falloff in production we see
oss the Sanskrit world.
me repeat what I alluded to in my
ening remarks, that it is only a cer-
n kind of modernity that makes us
moan what might otherwise be taken
a steady state of civilisational equi-
se: the industrialisation and com-
dification of knowledge in western
dernity, one could argue, in contrasthe reproduction of artisanal intellec-
l practices, are merely a result of the
erlasting uncertainty and agitation
t capitalism brought in its wake, not
ne qua non of an intellectual tradi-
n. Moreover although I cannot go
o the argument here the moderni-
ion of intellectual life in Europe was
onsequence of a widespread dissolu-
n of the previous social, political, and
ritual orders.
highly cultivated, and consequen-
research question for Indian colo-
l history has been well put by David
shbrook: If its long-term relation-
p with India was, at least in part, a
ndition for the rise of Britains Moder-
y, how far conversely were relationsh Britain a condition for Indias
ditionality? I am beginning to won-
whether the traditionalisation that
shbrook and others have found to
a hallmark of early colonialism may
ve been a practice earlier developed
and later adapted from Indian elites
mselves.